These are the sessions I’m planning to hit at GDC 2006. Also, what I’m hoping to get out of the session, notes about speakers, and experiences I’ve gleaned from six years of GDC attendance.

The first thing to note is that I have backups for almost all time slots in case it becomes clear the session is not going to be worth my time (as sometimes happens.) I’ve walked out on a lot of speeches over the years for a variety of reasons; I can smell a lemon within the first five to ten minutes . Last year there was a particularly appealing-sounding speech by the lead programmer of Metroid Prime, one of my favorite games from the last few years. Specifically, he was talking about how he designed and implemented Prime’s exemplary camera system. Unfortunately, he didn’t really have anything insightful to share about how to design a better camera system. His speech could be boiled down to ‘I solved the problem by being a very smart man.’ Great. Thanks a lot.

*thumbs down + raspberry*

So I walked down the hall to a fascinating session about usability testing that yielded a wealth of practical information that I’ve implemented both in teaching and testing my games. Seems to be the way of it.

In years past, I’ve stuck around out of a sense of courtesy to the speaker or because I keep hoping they’ll finally get around to saying something useful, especially when the session title or topic is very interesting to me. The reality, though, is that there are a lot of crap speeches every year at GDC, and if you find yourself in a session that’s biting the Big One for whatever reason, the biggest favor you can do yourself is to go find something better. Fill out a comment form saying that you’re walking out and why, but don’t waste time and energy on a session that’s not valuable. I guarantee you’ll be able to find another session to go to. Try stuff outside your area or things that sound random or interesting. This is how I’ve stumbled on some of the best sessions I’ve ever seen. A session by Brian Moriarty enigmatically titled “The Secret of Psalm 46” comes to mind. It featured an hour long playback of a lunar eclipse writ large on the projector screen and some fascinating information about Shakespeare intertwined with a meditation on the nature of human creativity. It stands out in my memory as one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen, GDC or elsewhere. Delightful.

Game Design Workshop

Overview: This intensive 2-day workshop will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activities, group discussion, analysis and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover formal abstract design tools that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games.

Marc LeBlanc
Robin Hunicke
Tim Stellmach
Steve Librande
Randy Smith
Jonathan Hamel
Andrew Leker
Art Min
Frank Lantz
Austin Grossman

I’ve been to the Game Design Workshop numerous times, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m using it as a backup to the Emotion Boot Camp session this year simply because I’ve been to it many times, but if you’re any kind of game designer – aspiring, master, or otherwise – there’s something here for you. Veteran designers like Steve Librande, Randy Smith, and Marc LeBlanc enlighten by their simple presence. Robin Hunicke is a designer at Maxis, previously of the Interactive Entertainment Group at Northwestern University. She and I have a lot of crossover in our approach to understanding games, mostly stemming from flow theory, so I really dig the direction of her research. Also, I really liked her aesthetic experiment at Indie Game Jam 2. It’ll be fascinating to find out how her background has translated into her work as a designer at Maxis. Also, perhaps she interfaces with Will in some capacity. If so, I would love to pick her – and by extension his – brains. Actually, I would like to eat his brains. To steal his power. Yum.

I’ve also found the Game Design Workshop to be a fantastic resource for brainstorming and creativity tools. In years past, they’ve introduced participants to various creativity tools and locked them in with immediate, focused exercises in game design and brainstorming. I try to emulate some of the environment they create in the Game Design Workshop in my Gameplay and Game Design class. In fact, I was introduced to my all-time favorite creativity author, Roger Von Oech, through this session at GDC 2003. If you haven’t checked out this book and are employed or seeking employment in any creative field, do yourself a favor and order “A Whack on the Side of the Head” right now – it’s the best $10 you’ll spend this hour.

Emotion Boot Camp: Putting More Emotion into Play

Overview: Using what players like most about play, this playshop offers tools and tactics for creating emotion for next-generation player experiences based on XEODesign’s close examination of players during play, and Isbister’s research at Stanford and the Rensselaer Games Research Laboratory.

Nicole Lazzaro
Katherine Isbister

Nicole’s research is interesting, though I disagree with some of her approach – some things she’s shoe horning into ‘emotion’ don’t sit quite right with me, something I need to articulate better perhaps. I also cringe slightly at the way XEODesign is trying to create a fit-all ‘system’ to apply to games and to sell it to everyone. Knizia’s ‘using the same approach often leads to the same results’ sits much better with me and my personal experience of game-centric creativity and design. Then again, this alone should be reason enough to listen to what she has to say:

“Most informative talk at GDC. Every designer should learn how to read this language.”
-Will Wright, Creator of The Sims

Based on their site, I’m not exactly sure which session Will Wright said this about, and if it was in fact theirs, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt .

I’ve been chatting with Katherine on and off for almost a year now; we may collaborate on something in the future. I really like her laid back, grounded approach. In a weird way, she kind of reminds of Carl Sagan – she brings a sense of awe and wonder to her work in a nonchalant way, and it’s hard to imagine disagreeing with her.

Do it Yourself Usability: How to use User Research to Improve Your Game

Overview: This tutorial introduces game developers to the basics of usability testing. Attendees learn how to use usability testing to ensure that their design vision comes across to the end-user.

Marcos Nunes-Ueno
John Davis
Kevin Goebel
David Quiroz
Charles Harrison
Philip Hove
Tracey Sellar
John Hopson

Woot. Marcos and crew were amazing last year – they probably ran the best organized tutorial I’ve ever been to at a GDC. This session was overflowing with useful, practical tips and strategies for identifying usability problems in games; they’re applying a bunch of great metrics for success in games that I think few designers understand or appreciate. My short rant about metrics is this: in order to improve something you must first measure it.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days

Overview: From the whirlwind Experimental Gameplay Project that lovingly brought you TOWER OF GOO and SUBURBAN BRAWL, this session is a giant collection of bite-size tips, tricks, and demos showing how anyone can prototype a ton of games in no time at all.

Kyle Gabler
Kyle Gray

I love, love, love the Experimental Gameplay Project. I wish I’d been a part of it. “Rogue ideas, brilliant and well-executed. Nothing is so beautiful and perfect. When I see it, I want to share it. Then I feel it, and I want to create.” Yeah. Cheers, gents.

On a pragmatic note, I’ll be very interested to see if they have anything insightful to add to their lengthy post of same name on Gamasutra. There were definitely some interesting nuggets in there, but the whole thing felt a bit inchoate to me – hopefully they’ve gotten to more meaty fare after more time spent mulling. If not, I’m off to see “Game Design Considerations for Alternate Controllers” with the Harmonix guys. I really loved what they tried to do with Antigrav, and Guitar Hero rocks my socks like a box of chalk. And, hey, the ‘Alternate Controller’ bit seems particularly apropos, what with the Revolution looming.

Counter-Intuitive Creative Direction

Harvey Smith

Overview: Harvey Smith–Studio Creative Director for Midway’s Austin Studio–moderates a panel on the continuing evolution of the game designer, outlining crafty tactics for building strong game design teams, developing creative leaders, framing up game concepts and avoiding tricky mistakes associated with the role of creative direction at video game studios.

Why? Because I dig Harvey Smith’s style:

“I believe in creative process.” Smith states, emphatically. “I don’t believe creativity is some wild no man’s land. I think it’s something that can be de-constructed. I think you can come up with practical techniques. I think you can develop a shared vocabulary and then communicate with the people around you and upgrade them and they can upgrade you.”
Like one of his early mentors, Doug Church, Smith also believes in the value of a shared game design vocabulary: “It’s getting there now, but thirteen years ago when people sat down to talk about what made a game fun or not, it was really hilarious. It was like watching drunk people at a party try to explain some sort of important life experience to one other. It just didn’t work.”

Preach it, brotha!

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

Jonathan Blow

Overview: A collection of short presentations showing new and experimental game designs.

This has been one of my favorite sessions every year since its inception (2002.) Each year, you get the results of the Indie Game Jam, which are always bubbling with innovative ideas and effective (if somewhat ragged) implantations. In addition, this is a showcase for a variety of fascinating, innovative projects that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve or show great promise. Interestingly, some projects that go off a storm at Experimental Gameplay go on to be successful, fascinating, industry changing events. For example, the tumultuous ovation Katamari Damacy received when it was shown at Experimental Gameplay 2004 convinced the Namco executives present it would be worth releasing in outside of Japan, to the benefit of all game-kind.

Advanced Prototyping

Overview: Creating effective prototypes of game designs, user interfaces, and technologies requires a unique set of skills and knowledge, somewhat distinct from the skills used in making a game. This lecture discusses creating these various types of prototypes from an advanced and in-depth perspective. The talk goes through a number of important questions and topics that should be addressed before, during, and after the prototype is created, including metrics for judging the effectiveness of prototypes, how to decide the focus of a prototype, how to design, start, and build the prototype, both from a content and a code standpoint, and how to iterate the prototype via testing and integrating feedback. Various approaches to these issues are compared and contrasted, with the end goal of teaching attendees how to create successful and high quality prototypes.

Chaim Gingold
Chris Hecker

Chaim Gingold is kind of my hero. I’ve been following Chaim since his inspiring bendy plant game prototype thing from Indie Game Jam 2. It was a supremely neat, organic, and delightfully social little puzzle game. Beautiful. Last year, he gave an interesting little blurb at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions about the rapid prototyping work he does at Maxis, and showed off some of his quick and dirty prototypes for various things, some of which I recognized from the Spore presentation (the curving/branching city roads, for example.) So, yeah, he gets to do rapid prototyping for a living and he works with Will Wright. Best job ever.

Come to think of it, Hecker is also a badass. He was one of the original creators of the Indie Game Jam (the main one, I believe) and has contributed vitally to giving innovation a voice and a place in the industry. Each year, he reports back the output of the Indie Game Jam at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at micro-machine speed, and the world is better for it. He now also works at Maxis, on Spore. Good times.

One thing that I originally found off-putting about the Indie Game Jam/Experimental Gameplay Workshop was its emphasis on the programmer-as-designer model. I come from an art background, and while I’ve learned how to program well enough to create rapid prototypes in Virtools, solving clever technological problems may never come easily for me. That said, I think the only litmus test one needs to pass to be considered a game designer is that of designing a game. Stupid, right? I honestly don’t care what the medium is (amazing and innovative board games do exist), or whether the game is built around a clever piece of technology. I don’t buy the idea that the only way to innovate is through the prism of demo scene style programming. It certainly seems to help, though I’m almost inclined to call in a ‘correlation versus causation’ strike: it seems that brilliant, creative people – IE people who program at that level – are drawn to creating innovative fare regardless. A foundation of intelligence and education builds thinkers instead of drones, I’d say. Also, and I guess I draft Costikyan on this, it seems to me that different combinations of game elements in different measures and applied different ways do constitute innovation, albeit incremental. I look at a game like X-Com and I don’t see anything that can’t, if componentized, be traced back to earlier designs. That’s not the point, though. The point is how they were combined, how the system feeds into and out of itself, and the overall tuning of the game. The Longview, essentially. God, I love X-Com.

What’s Next in Design

Will Wright

Overview: Why are you still reading this? It’s Will Wright!

Nuff said. Will always amazes with his intense, blazing intelligence, keen insight, and boundless warmth, humor, playfulness. No matter what he’s talking about he’s not to be missed. And if you really need more convincing, watch his speech from last year or read my ranting fanboy post about it. Mmm. Brainsss.

The Game Design Challenge: The Nobel Peace Prize

Eric Zimmerman
Cliff Bleszinski
Harvey Smith
Keita Takahashi

Overview: The Game Design Challenge is back! This year’s theme: Design a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize. Come and see how our contestants solve the design problem – and vote for the winner!

With this challenge, Zimmerman’s outdone himself. This is awesome, and I cannot wait to see what Keita Takahashi comes up with. The topic seems tailor made for him. Also, it’ll be interesting to see whether it’s as neat, interesting, and innovative this year without Will Wright to bring the house down. As usual, I expect at least one of the three participants to completely drop the ball, to not really do their homework. In the ‘Design a Love Story’ challenge, it was Warren Spector’s cop out non-design; last year it was Peter Molyneux’s lame, overproduced tech demo with Emily Dickenson poetry read over it. My money’s on Cliffy B, who always seems to me to be a fountain of buzzwords and Potemkin insight. Should be a great session for a variety of reasons.

Right! That takes is up through the middle of Thursday. More to come later!

- Swink

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